Mining For Minerals This Summer Season

All the essential holiday season partying and abundance of food and drink can easily leave your body depleted of essential micronutrients. Here’s how to check that you have the right foods and minerals on your list to restock your mind and body ready for your New Year.

- Matt Legge

The Australian festive season is a celebration of abundance. You really get to see just how lucky we are to live in such a wonderful country at this time of year.

The weather is perfect for the beaches, bushwalks, backyard cricket, slip and slides, and Christmas parties where we are all having too much fun to mind the sweating and heat — and in any case, when it gets too warm, we are all into the pool or ocean to cool down.

And the food! The seafood, the stone fruits and mangoes and lychees are abundant — but so are the treats and lollies. There’s so much to drink, both cold and sweet, and the alcohol may be flowing late into the hot, summer nights.

Regardless of your religion, culture, or ancestry, it is time to have fun with your mates and enjoy the abundance of riches, joy, and culinary treasures to be found in such a lucky country.

Then we come back to reality and consider our goals and aspirations for the New Year. We make resolutions. New Year equals new me.

We have such good intentions, but for many of us New Year’s resolutions still haven’t started by the end of January or they’re started but all over by the end of February.

Why do we struggle to get on top of our New Year’s resolutions?

It’s because, paradoxically, our celebration of abundance creates exhaustion and deficiency. We may be loading up on macronutrients (protein, sugars, and fats), but then depleting our micronutrients (B-complex vitamins and minerals — in particular zinc, selenium, and magnesium).

Salty sweat